To anyone looking to upgrade their PC for B&S

[LapPuru]

Gonna go against conventional wisdom that says GPU is the most important factor for a gaming pc here, because it really just isn't for B&S.

 

even with a midrange $150 amd OR nvidia card you will be bottlenecking on your CPU. This is why changing settings or resolution doesn't do shit for most people except those on integrated or straight up ancient cards. Buy a 980 ti to go with your i5-2500k and you're going to be a sad panda.

 

Essentially, you want SINGLE CORE PERFORMANCE over all else. The unreal engine is garbage and directx9 doesn't help. The game refuses to use more than 2 threads. Period. That's why you folks out there with quad cores never go above 50% cpu usage outside of loading, and 8 core people cap out at 25%.

 

The most cost efficient cpu would be an i3-6100. It's quite cheap at around $100-$120, you'll be pushing as many or more frames than someone with a $1000 i7-5960x. Yes, really.

 

Along with that I would recommend grabbing an nvidia card because physx and maxwell architecture takes some load off of the cpu and helps just a bit. GTX 960 would be the best to go with it IMO, anything higher would be utterly wasted and offer no more performance in B&S.

 

tl;dr unless you're on integrated or an entry level card from 2009 don't upgrade your GPU, upgrade [or even 'downgrade' in some cases!] your CPU to something with baller single core performance and low cost, like the aforementioned i3-6100, which will perform better than most 4/8/16/32/whatever core cpu's out there atm in this game.

 

[Victorion]

I agree with you overall.

 

BnS is CPU intensive, especially single-core intensive.

AMD cores won´t do great, and a 6 or 8 core cpu won´t give you much better frames than a quadcore.

I´d still suggest at least a 750TI card, or preferably a 950/960/970 card. In terms of cost.

 

i5-2500k is still going strong, especially for cpu intensive games. The 2500k sandylakebased cpu has great overclocking potential, and will most likely outdo a non overclocked i3-6100. If pair the i3-6100 with a Z-series chipset mobo, you should see similar results though, perhaps even in favour of the i3-6100 cpu. I´d imagine it comes down to the chip-lottery tbh and how well you can overclock, depending on your knowledge and other hardware/temps.

 

Personally, I have a 2nd summerhouse pc, with an overclocked i5-2500K cpu sitting at 4.5 Ghz. It does great for BnS. I can overclock it to 4.7 Ghz, but prime95 doesn´t seem too happy about it.

[LapPuru]

i would agree a 750 ti + i3-6100 would also be good and perform similarly to those people with thousand dollar systems.

might still cap out on gpu usage in some cases though, assuming everything is maxed out. 960 was a safe bet because even with max settings it will never be holding back the cpu

 

ofc if you ran with some things set to high instead of max it would never happen on the 750 ti

[GreenDestiny]

It is true an I3-6100 will do okay but it will definitely not perform better than any of the recent i5s like the overclock friendly 4690K and considering the platform the i3-6100 runs on is more expensive to build it doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you plan on upgrading the cpu in a year or two anyway. Also despite the rumors going around this game does use more than one core. The video card advice is pretty good as long as you only play at 1080P. If you play at 1440P like a lot of gamers now you need a GTX 970 or higher.

[Victorion]

3 hours ago, GreenDestiny said:

It is true an I3-6100 will do okay but it will definitely not perform better than any of the recent i5s like the overclock friendly 4690K and considering the platform the i3-6100 runs on is more expensive to build it doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you plan on upgrading the cpu in a year or two anyway. Also despite the rumors going around this game does use more than one core. The video card advice is pretty good as long as you only play at 1080P. If you play at 1440P like a lot of gamers now you need a GTX 970 or higher.

 

You were right till people figured out the massive BCLK overclock potential on non-k series skylake chips.

 

I´ve seen a i3-6100 being overclocked too 4.8 Ghz. That´s dam impressive on such a cheap core, and the skylake archicture is newer and better than haswell.

Here´s one at 4.7 Ghz.

 

http://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/Overclocking-Locked-Intel-Skylake-CPUs-Possible-i3-6100-Benchmarked

 

[GreenDestiny]

5 hours ago, Victorion said:

 

You were right till people figured out the massive BCLK overclock potential on non-k series skylake chips.

 

I´ve seen a i3-6100 being overclocked too 4.8 Ghz. That´s dam impressive on such a cheap core, and the skylake archicture is newer and better than haswell.

Here´s one at 4.7 Ghz.

 

http://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/Overclocking-Locked-Intel-Skylake-CPUs-Possible-i3-6100-Benchmarked

 

 

The latest I read is that certain motherboard manufacturers are updating their firmware to prevent it so you have to be careful if you plan on going that route. Obviously if you buy a new motherboard and it already has a firmware lock you may be out of luck.

 

http://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboard/90323-intel-skylake-non-k-oc-koed-asrock/

 

 

[Victorion]

13 hours ago, GreenDestiny said:

 

The latest I read is that certain motherboard manufacturers are updating their firmware to prevent it so you have to be careful if you plan on going that route. Obviously if you buy a new motherboard and it already has a firmware lock you may be out of luck.

 

http://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboard/90323-intel-skylake-non-k-oc-koed-asrock/

 

 

 

Well you could just not update BIOS and overclock?

I don´t see the problem really. The update isn´t needed for BnS at all.

 

The real problem is that Intel is making alot less money.

Take their i5 series skylake cpus:

 

	Intel Core i5-6400	2.7GHz	4	65W			$179.99
	Intel Core i5-6500 (OEM/Tray)	3.2GHz	4	65W			$189.49
	Intel Core i5-6500	3.2GHz	4	65W			$199.89
	Intel Core i5-6600	3.3GHz	4	65W			$215.99
	Intel Core i5-6600K	3.5GHz	4	91W			$244.78

 

So take the cheapest i5-6400, pair it with a Z170 chipset mobo and start BCLK overclocking, and you get alot better results than an i5-6600 cpu.

Overclock the i5-6600K and you´ll get similar results, slightly in favour of i5-6600K - but arguably not worth $55.

 

For gaming, i3 skylake chips do great when overclocked - because there isn´t alot of games that really use more than 4 threads.

[Vudis]

Since you guys seem to be knowledgable about this:

With this setup (above mine, below my brothers) http://puu.sh/nnyku/09d2372a75.jpg

do you know how I get 5-15 sec freeze at blackwyrm with settings on auto/optimized combat and ctrl+f, nameplates, etc. disabled

while my brother doesnt even need ctrl+f for everything to work perfectly fine?

 

Maybe someone here can help me figure that out.^^

[GreenDestiny]

5 hours ago, Victorion said:

 

Well you could just not update BIOS and overclock?

I don´t see the problem really. The update isn´t needed for BnS at all.

 

The real problem is that Intel is making alot less money.

Take their i5 series skylake cpus:

 

 

 

Yeah I'm not trying to argue about it. I just said if you build a "new" system you have to be careful the motherboard doesn't already have a lock on it.

[GreenDestiny]

3 hours ago, Vudis said:

Since you guys seem to be knowledgable about this:

With this setup (above mine, below my brothers) http://puu.sh/nnyku/09d2372a75.jpg

do you know how I get 5-15 sec freeze at blackwyrm with settings on auto/optimized combat and ctrl+f, nameplates, etc. disabled

while my brother doesnt even need ctrl+f for everything to work perfectly fine?

 

Maybe someone here can help me figure that out.^^

 

Do you have an SSD or regular hard drive? A slow hard drive can cause some freezes but there are a millions things it could be to be honest.

[Victorion]

51 minutes ago, GreenDestiny said:

 

Do you have an SSD or regular hard drive? A slow hard drive can cause some freezes but there are a millions things it could be to be honest.

 

Slow harddrive will not cause freeze.

 

Freeze are caused by things like:

- failing hardware 

- drivers stopped working

- cpu running at 100%

- program not responding

- bad optimization

- overheat

[OneYouHate]

@Victorion

 

yeah i disagree low ram and slow hdd (5200) will create a freeze as your system is attempting to swap resources around as it is trying to render. 7200 is the norm for a gaming hdd, SSD is the preferred. it is for a reason other than just bragging rights.

[Emya]

5 hours ago, Vudis said:

Since you guys seem to be knowledgable about this:

With this setup (above mine, below my brothers) http://puu.sh/nnyku/09d2372a75.jpg

do you know how I get 5-15 sec freeze at blackwyrm with settings on auto/optimized combat and ctrl+f, nameplates, etc. disabled

while my brother doesnt even need ctrl+f for everything to work perfectly fine?

 

Maybe someone here can help me figure that out.^^

 

 

You are running at 2.5GHz. Your brother is at 3.5GHz. That's 40% more CLK frequency. I think that's the reason.

As TS had said, BnS is more of CPU intensive than GPU intensive.

 

[Vudis]

We both dont have SSD.

I've also monitored my cpu while playing and it never reached 100% or overheated. Not even close tbh.

 

@Emya

I guess what you said is right? I heard that BnS only runs on 1 core so it actually works against me that I have 8 mhm?

[Victorion]

8 minutes ago, Vudis said:

We both dont have SSD.

I've also monitored my cpu while playing and it never reached 100% or overheated. Not even close tbh.

 

@Emya

I guess what you said is right? I heard that BnS only runs on 1 core so it actually works against me that I have 8 mhm?

 

Problem is you´re comparing apples to oranges.

 

i7-4710HQ is a notebook CPU - can´t compare to a desktop CPU. They are different designs with different priorities.

Same goes for the GPU.

GTX 970 is alot faster than GTX 970M.

 

I am pretty sure you knew this already....

[Vudis]

Of course I knew that. It's still not a system that should have trouble with BnS...

[Emya]

12 hours ago, Vudis said:

We both dont have SSD.

I've also monitored my cpu while playing and it never reached 100% or overheated. Not even close tbh.

 

@Emya

I guess what you said is right? I heard that BnS only runs on 1 core so it actually works against me that I have 8 mhm?

 

Uh, no. BnS at the very least runs on 2 cores, from what I see on task manager (I'm using a i7 3770K myself).

And I'm quite sure it won't use more than 4.

 

So two i7 cores running at 2.5GHz vs two i5 cores running at 3.5GHz -- the i5 has the fclk advantage (for this game).

 

And to top it, you're using a mobile GPU... didn't notice the M suffix earlier.